The Daily Gazette (Schenectady, New York)

The Daily Gazette (Schenectady, New York)

Projects would be boon for unions

By KYLE ADAMS, May 24, 2015 Sunday

An hour before the first open house on the Northeast Energy Direct pipeline, proposed to follow the same route as the Constitution Pipeline through Schoharie County, more than a dozen members of the Local 157 Laborers' Union met at Justine's restaurant in Cobleskill.

"It's a massive project," Frank Marchese, media relations director of the New York State Laborers' Organizing Fund, told members before heading to the presentation last month, "and it will be 100 percent union from start to finish."

The members, mostly from Schoharie County or nearby, wore orange Laborers' International Union of North America shirts that have become a staple of pipeline presentations and public hearings. Before heading to the open house in Schoharie, they grabbed signs reading, "We live here. We raise our families here. And we support the Northeast Energy Direct project."

Labor support

For the past year, Local 157 and a few other local unions have supported the proposed pipeline projects as ardently as environmentalists have opposed them. Where opponents see destruction and threat, laborers see "living-wage jobs" close to home.

"When our men are working, they have income," said Marchese. "They have income to pay their bills, support their families. But they also have income to support local businesses like this."

To set an example, he said, members of Local 157 and other unions would be meeting before every NED open house (there were eight from April 6 to April 16 along the proposed route from Schoharie to Towanda, Pennsylvania) at independently-owned restaurants before showing their support at the presentations.

"A pipeline only comes through every couple years or so," he said, "so we embrace it."

The NED project, backed by Tennessee Gas Pipeline Co., a subsidiary of Kinder Morgan Energy Partners, has been proposed to carry gas from Pennsylvania to a compressor station in the town of Wright, following the route of the proposed Constitution Pipeline. If Constitution receives its final permits from the state Department of Environmental Conservation this summer, construction will likely begin next spring.

Marchese said each pipeline project would employ more than 100 members from Local 157 during construction, and about as many from each of the other unions that have agreements with the pipeline companies -- three others in the case of NED and two others for Constitution.

Local jobs

Generally, pipeline construction projects use about 50 percent specialist labor and 50 percent local unions, according to Chris Stockton, spokesman for Constitution Pipeline LLC. Wages are set by the National Pipeline Agreement, about $22 to $23 an hour in the case of the union laborers.

Constitution estimates the entire project will generate about $130 million in labor income, according to Stockton, with about 1,300 workers on the ground at peak construction.

"It's a long project, it requires a lot of different types of trades and it's a shot in the arm for communities where work is going to be taking place and for the folks who are doing this kind of work," Stockton said. "Organized labor has been very outspoken and very supportive of the infrastructure that we're proposing."

Each project will last a year to 18 months. When opponents use that fact to argue the local benefit is temporary, union members tend to roll their eyes.

"All of our jobs in construction are temporary jobs," said Local 157 Business Manager Pete Stearns of Gloversville. "You try to patch together 30 years of temporary jobs to get a pension."

Another accusation they're tired of hearing is that the pipeline companies pay for their support at public events. With shirts that sometimes bear the name of the pipeline and a close relationship between the companies and the unions as they negotiate labor contracts, suspicions are easily raised.

"That rumor has been around for a long time," Marchese said at Justine's in Cobleskill. "Everything you see here tonight -- the shirts, the signs, the dinner -- are being paid for by the members. We never have, we never will accept anything from a gas company other than a commitment to employ our workers."

'Great opportunity'

Local 157, based in Schenectady, has about 550 active members. In its support of the pipeline projects, it's joined by Laborers' Local 190 of Glenmont, and Operating Engineers Local 158 of Albany, which has about 4,300 members.

Dan McGraw, business manager for Local 158, said he would expect 500 to 600 union members to work on each pipeline project. As with the Laborers, he said pipelines are "a great work opportunity" for the operating engineers.

"We don't build too many interstate highways anymore in New York, so most of our road work is rehabilitation, bridge rehabilitation, road improvements," he said. "And they're all good jobs and they're all projects that need to be done, but they don't require nearly as many operating engineers or laborers or welders, as a pipeline would."

Pipelines are big, fast, well-organized and well-financed. For members of the Laborers and Operating Engineers union, that means they can rack up a lot of hours in a season.

"The hours are what you need to make the money," said Denny Rowe, a member of the Operating Engineers for nearly 30 years.

Rowe lives near Binghamton and has been traveling long distances the past few years to work on pipelines. He said the closest he's worked to home in the past four or five years was 90 miles.

"When we're out there, we're working 12 to 15 hours a day, six to seven days a week," he said. "It's a hard time, but they give you some money to get everything paid up and ahead enough for the struggles we have when there's no work, like right now."

Like many other operating engineers, Rowe hasn't worked since last fall, when he finished the last job he was on. In the three years he's worked on pipelines, he said he earned more than $100,000 a year (other operating engineers reported taking in $200,000 in a season on pipelines).

"Working construction, I didn't make half that," he said.

Close to home

The Constitution Pipeline would come within 15 miles of his house, he said. That would mean he'd be home every night for dinner and for the Sunday gatherings with his children and grandchildren.

"I would just like to be able to sleep in my own bed this summer and get a nice paycheck at the end of the week," he said.

Even though it is in its early stages, the NED project has already seen at least as much opposition as Constitution did. The first open house in Schoharie was dominated by a protest against the pipeline, where opposition groups spoke about explosions along other gas lines, shared eminent domain horror stories and took the opportunity to confront both representatives of Tennessee Gas and the unions in exchanges that sometimes, but rarely, turned tense.

Among the "Stop the Pipeline" signs and protest songs, the orange-clad members of Local 157 stood mostly quiet, holding their own signs strategically over the crowd or in the background of news broadcasts.

Marchese said he was surprised by the level of opposition, but at this point, he said he's unfazed by the antipipeline "hysteria."

"It goes in one ear and out the other," he said. "The bottom line is this is a private company that wants to invest millions of dollars in New York state infrastructure, which we need desperately. And this is one of the areas of the state that needs it the most."

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